This study analyzes Augustine’s interpretation of the number 153, found in John 21,11. Despite Augustine’s condemnation of those mathematicians who calculated a person’s destiny out of his or her birthday and name, we have to bear in mind the critical passage Gen. ad litteram 2, 17, 37. He immersed himself into the study of figures and numbers in the Bible, and their allegoric interpretation was part of his exegesis. In this we may be able to see not only a proof of his neo-platonian education, which comprised geometry and arithmetics, but also his inclination towards exact science. This paper is an attempt to compile and understand the texts of Augustine in which he interprets the Johannine number 153.
The asceticism of women was genuine during the period of late Antiquity. The few sources that are at our disposal reveal their energy, their character, their exceptional cultural creative power that differed from society, their ability to make innovative decisions on their own, and even their courage to embark on enormous economic operations that had an impact on society itself and that did not comply with then the current standards and content. Making use of prosopographical research we intend to demonstrate that female hermitage was a novelty and not a more radical kind of virginity and this in light of the fact that monasticism used to be based on virginity and widowhood.
The paper traces the Christianization of the West by focusing on the practice of penitence and discipline. It attempts to uncover hidden traces of a changing mentality of the individual and the society. This procedure is presented as a viable path toward obtaining an insight of how Europe had been in fact Christianized.
The Catholic priest and Deputy Florián Tománek (1877 – 1948) can be regarded as one of the figureheads that, after World War II, spearheaded Political Catholicism. He is an example of mirroring the political life in Slovakia at his lifetime. His political dedication for the Liberty Party (Strana slobody) can be considered as one of the interesting moments of his personal life, but serves also as an example for the zeitgeist after World War II that had been shaped by a reshuffling of the political forces in the renewed Czecho-Slovakia. The intention of this paper is to explore relevant sources to reconstruct his part in the set-up of the post-World War Political Catholicism and to highlight his contributions for and his role in the Liberty Party (Strana slobody).
The corruption in any possible manifestation is a phenomenon that seems to be inherent in the development of human societies. That applies also to the nascent Slovak political Catholicism that was confronted with the vice of corruption even in its early days. The study highlights the corruption affair of 1911 and the entanglement of Florián Tománek, Catholic priest and editor of the newspaper “Slovenské ľudové noviny” (Slovak People’s News) and one of the closest allies of Andrej Hlinka. New findings that are based on a detailed analysis of the press at that time and which are supplemented by fundamental research in archives will cast light on local corruption before the First World War and will highlight its mechanisms that were part of the power struggle in Slovakia.
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